What is LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index and Why is it Important?

As the leader in B2B networking and social selling, LinkedIn is constantly improving how professionals connect, establish their personal brand, and promote their company’s products and services. Now, everyone has the ability to measure the effectiveness of their networking and marketing efforts on the platform with the Social Selling Index (SSI). This report measures your activity in four key areas against professionals in both your network and industry and gives you a rank based on a scale of 0 to 100. According to LinkedIn, it is a “first-of-its-kind measure.” It can help you optimize your profile and marketing activities, ensuring that you are getting the most out of your efforts.

Understanding the 4 key areas of your SSI score and how to improve them

Understanding your score is the first step to improving your social selling results. To find your score, log in to your account and navigate to linkedin.com/sales/ssi. Here, you can view your Industry and Network SSI rank, as well as the four components of your score – creating your brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships. Each pillar rating is between 0 and 25. These make up your total score out of a possible 100 points.

Establishing a professional brand

The first of the four pillars, establishing a professional brand, evaluates two elements including, the completeness of your LinkedIn profile and the quality of content that you post. This score is the ticket to becoming a thought leader in your industry. If you haven’t taken the time to fill out key areas of your profile such as your photo, summary, recommendations, or job descriptions, your score may reflect it. Fortunately, this is an easy step to take in order to boost your score.

When it comes to improving the quality of the content that you post, there are a few ways you can achieve this. It’s essential to post content that provides your audience with value and avoid content that seems spammy. Posts that contain images of people, important industry topics, and that are helpful to people in your industry will perform better. Consistency is also key, so make sure you are posting frequently. Finally, don’t post and ghost. Be sure to follow up with comments from your peers and offer quality feedback.

Finding the right people

Moving on to the next pillar, finding the right people. This is a tricky one because they tied it to the platform’s Sales Navigator premium membership. This makes it harder to get a higher score in this area. Essentially, the goal of this metric is to ensure you are connecting with the right people, aka decision makers, that will lead to more sales.

Engage with insights

Engage with insights is the third score on LinkedIn’s SSI and it translates to the number of posts you are engaging with on the platform. The best way to boost this score is by regularly commenting on, liking, and sharing posts from people in your network. LinkedIn also looks at the quality of your comments, so make sure you are offering value in your comments as well and starting engaging conversations around industry topics. The basic “nice job” comment will not gain you any points in this area.

Building relationships

The last, but definitely not least, metric is building relationships. This pillar is all about managing your network and ensuring that you are maintaining your connections by interacting with them effectively, whether through comments or DMs.

Why is having a high score important for B2B professionals?

LinkedIn is the ideal platform for networking and social selling, and a high score brings even better connections and more sales.

LinkedIn data has proven that your SSI score matters. Higher scores in their key pillars have resulted in improved leads and sales. The proof is in their numbers:

• Sellers create 45% more opportunities than peers with lower SSI.
• Deals sourced through deep sales deliver a 2.3x increase in average deal size.
• 72% of revenue is influenced by deep sales practices.

The higher your score, the more visibility you have among important decision-makers in your industry, leading to more revenue.

Your SSI is worth monitoring to ensure all the hard work you are putting into your marketing efforts is paying off. Knowing exactly what area you need to focus on can help you reach your goals even faster and easier. Don’t wait – check your score today and maximize all the benefits LinkedIn has to offer B2B professionals!